2 VA Officials Stole $400,000, Defended by Top VA Official

A high-ranking Department of Veterans Affairs official on Tuesday defended the VA’s failure to discipline two employees accused of misconduct, and blamed the outrage over their lenient treatment on “considerable external pressure” by the media and Congress to punish personnel who may not have done anything wrong.

Sloan Gibson, deputy VA secretary, praised a judge’s recent decision to stop the demotions of Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, two VA officials accused of together stealing more than $400,000 in benefits from the government.

The allegations against Graves and Rubens came in a September 2015 inspector general report, which found the two officials had created job openings for themselves in far-away cities and gamed a VA program meant to pay the moving expenses of agency employees.